beautiful book, but i just can't bear the dialect. what the eff is a 'fambly'? it's like trying to read while someone keeps flicking you in the face. anyway, some guy on npr made a pretty interesting case the other day for its modern relevance ...of course, the true moral of the story is, never swerve to run over a turtle.save the turtles!

The difference between GoW and Woody's Pastures of Plenty is... if you move your lips while reading GoW they hold you back a couple of grades, but if you move your lips to PoP your a hippy and people pass you the doobie.

Dunno about Steinbeck's political views, but the quote sounds like your typical left coast lunacy. Hug a tree, free to be you& me, Adam & Steve, right & wrong are make-believe... librrsls: coprophiliacs.

Stinkyy:Dunno about Steinbeck's political views, but the quote sounds like your typical left coast lunacy. Hug a tree, free to be you& me, Adam & Steve, right & wrong are make-believe... librrsls: coprophiliacs.

Why oh why would you make me google that word on Easter morning, with all the chocolate around? o_O

I remember near the end of my freshman year of HS, we took a family trip to SF. I bought a t-shirt there with the "Route 66" logo on it because I thought it was cool. I was from Michigan, and there was no Route 66 in the state.

I was wearing it over my track uniform before a meet a couple weeks later, and a bunch of the sophomores on the team were like "Route 66? Why do you like Route 66? Are you an Okie? Are you Ma Joad?" and laughed at me.

I had no idea what they were talking about.

Then in sophomore year english class the next year, I read Grapes of Wrath, and was like "Ah, NOW I see where they were coming from."

OccamsWhiskers:I am grateful that I was never assigned this book for school reading. After 6th grade, that always seemed to extinguish any joy I got from reading.

I always read the book way more than the assigned reading and then read something else in class and then had to re-read the assigned reading but always procrastinated that part because I was already on a different book and long story short I never did well because I didn't remember where the class was at relative to the book.

And the AP English teacher I had when we had to read Grapes was a complete elitist tool who kept mis-pronouncing Memaw as "MEE-maw" instead of "M'maw" which is the way anybody who has been outside of their farking collegiate ivory tower understands is the way some American subcultures refer to their grandmothers and I could never tell if he was actually that obtuse or if he was deliberately being a dipshiat about it as a way of asserting his superiority over those uneducated rubes, probably the latter from the way he over-enunciated the improper pronunciation, and anyway I failed that class just to make him look bad. People back then were willing to die for a hill for no good reason, Ifelt justified in failing a class for more enlightened reasons.

jso2897:InB4 first asshole ranting about Steinbeck's alleged political views.Dear asshole: You're an asshole.

So Steinbeck was a socialist. Do you feel you need to offer a defense for socialism? You are free to proceed; that's what the First is all about. Simply stating the facts of Steinbeck's political views is not the action of an asshole. Preemptively playing the victim, however, with your "in before!" is an act of douchebaggery, or maybe just intellectual bankruptcy, or at the least sheer sloth.

Let's try this: Steinbeck was a socialist. How about YOU tell ME what that means?

lindalouwho:Stinkyy: Dunno about Steinbeck's political views, but the quote sounds like your typical left coast lunacy. Hug a tree, free to be you& me, Adam & Steve, right & wrong are make-believe... librrsls: coprophiliacs.

Why oh why would you make me google that word on Easter morning, with all the chocolate around? o_O